AutoMate BPA Server

Anything where automation would be helpful, I'd recommend. If you're doing a task over and over again, Automate can likely work and do it for you. It helps to keep things running exactly the same so that when failures occur, they can easily be traced to their source.

AutoMate's Windows interface can be quite buggy at times. We are using the latest and final build of AutoMate 10. It took many iterations to get this most stable build, but there are still many little issues that happen when building tasks. Copying and pasting too much causes GUI errors and can crash. Things don't indent properly, success/failure arrow lines in the Job window don't flow perfectly straight, etc. There is a newer version AutoMate 11, but it's so buggy we can't even use it properly.

Memory management is terrible on Aut 10 and 11. Just working in the program for a little bit building tasks has memory leaks that don't resolve until you close out of the program. You'll be using several GB of ram in no time.

Dashboard reporting could be better. We'd like a better way to track how jobs are running, when failures occur, etc. You can do that now, but the interface is cumbersome.

Alternatives Considered

At an older job we used to use SSIS as kind of an automation tool as well as it could also be used to connect to FTP sources, read files, etc. AutoMate is simply centrally designed to be true automation software. It is much more robust, can work with a variety of software (including SSIS itself) and is much quicker to integrate and troubleshoot.